It’s the end of the world as we know it?

2006 brings the next likely day for the world to come to an end. The first Tuesday in June this year is the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year (of this millennium, at least) – 6/6/6 on the Gregorian calendar.

OK, so the end-of-the-world folks missed it with Y2K (although I did find a carton of milk that expired January 1900 six years ago), and then again with Y2K1, which of course is the true start of the second millennium. I seem to recall that the Nostradamusites thought August 19, 2000 was going to be the big day. Three days in a 366-day span in which the ol’ ball was due to topple out of orbit, and here the Earth is still spinning away.

Atheists will scoff at the numerologists and argue that there was nothing unique about January 1, 2000 or January 1, 2001, nor will there be anything unique about June 6. Those dates are more or less arbitrary. Some Gregorian way back when happened to pick the tenth day after the winter solstice as the day on which the new year was to begin and we’ve stuck with it ever since. We’re not all in agreement as to what date it is, anyways. According to the Jews, 2006 ended 3,760 years ago. The Chinese are up in the 5000’s as well. Various religious types have their own views of when the party will be over.

But there is some fun attached to the notion of 6/6/6. Word is that the peninsula town of Hel, Poland, is seeing a flood of bookings from vacationers for that day. And our friend Tom has an interesting story that pertains to that day.

I guess technically the world has to come to an end some day. After all, nothing is truly infinite. So it may be that we have 21 weeks left; if so, at least it happens after the three-day Memorial Day weekend. Or, we may have 21,000 weeks left. Nobody really knows. Barring supernatural intervention, the sun is supposed to explode in a few million years anyways. That will pretty much mark the end of world as we know it.